We had another murder here last week. Actually, it was three murders and an attempted suicide. According to news reports:

What friends, family and authorities do say is that it appears that as Neal Jacobson sank deeper and deeper into depression, something terrible was building inside him.

The once successful mortgage broker from New Jersey left his company and moved to Florida to care for his ailing father, who died in 2007. Jacobson, 49, lost money in bad investments and hated himself despite his beautiful wife and brilliant twin sons, he confided in his best friend, Richard Norton.

When Norton died of cancer this month, it pushed him farther off his axis, said Norton’s wife, Laurie.

Less than a week after his friend’s funeral, Jacobson took up a gun and shot and killed his wife, Franki, 53, and 7-year-old boys, Eric and Joshua, according to a family member and Palm Beach County Sheriff’s investigators.

After killing his family – just hours before the twin boys’ seventh birthday party – Jacobson took 10 Xanax tablets and a gun and drove away. He go into an accident. Police asked what happened:

“I went off the deep end,” he said, according to the police affidavit.

I have a lot of questions. Most start with “why didn’t he…”

go to a doctor or psychologist?

voluntarily commit himself for observation?

call a suicide hotline?

call a pastor/priest/rabbi?

talk about his feelings?

ask for help?

I understand wanting to kill yourself. I have been at that place and it is a very, very real place – even though today it seems like a dream. But I do not understand the kind of depression and desperation that would drive a person to kill their own child. It must be some kind of excruciating, horrific, mental anguish that is beyond comprehension.

I feel terrible for men with depression and anxiety. It is not just the stigma of mental illness that they face. It is also the ridiculous stereotypes we hold about men – they are strong and do not need help. Men provide and protect. Men pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Men don’t talk about their feelings. Real men don’t get depression. Real men suck it up.

Do we say that about guys with erectile dysfunction? No. So why do we say it about guys with depression? Why aren’t there commercials about men, depression and the medications that can help them without chemically castrating them? Why aren’t men being told that they can take E.D. medications while on antidepressants?

The NIMH has a great program on its web site about men and depression. But let’s admit it. How many guys are going to go to the NIMH web site when they are not feeling right? Jacobson is not an isolated case. Since the economy tanked, these kinds of cases happen so often now that they barely grab headlines. Remember these cases from last year?

Ervin Lupoe, awash in debt, behind on his mortgage and recently fired from his job, killed his wife, five children and himself in Wilmington, Calif. Police said “he was despondent over a job situation and he saw no reasonable way out.”

Karthik Rajaram, a 45-year-old financial manager in Los Angeles, killed his wife, three children and mother-in- law after seeing his finances wiped out by the stock market collapse. “He had some behavioral problems,” a former boss said. “He wasn’t reliable. … He was not an emotionally stable person. It was a real problem and would affect any business he was involved in.”

There must be something we can do.

What is it?

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    Last reviewed: 30 Jan 2010